READ THIS FIRST: THIS IS THE AWARD FOR PLAYERS OF FFS EURO 2012 ONLY AND DOES NOT INCLUDE PEOPLE FROM FFS FRIENDLY WORLD CUP! THERE HAS BEEN A SEPARATE AWARD FOR THAT. KEEP UPRIGHT. CONTENTS MAY HAVE SETTLED DURING TRANSIT. THANK YOU.This was the hardest decision yet. You guys could have made my life easier by not going for such ballsy captains, giving me a nasty shock when I went through your final teams. You could have done the sensible thing and not hope for clean sheets from Greece and Sweden. You could have kept your hands off JKisthe1′s Danish one-night-stand. But no, you had to make life hard for me, and that’s why you have extreme valour. There isn’t even really space to include everyone in the honourable mentions without turning it into some kind of messy free-for-all. Special commiserations to those who grabbed unexpected clean sheets – it would have taken a captaincy to get into contention points-wise. So, here goes…I judged the award by the rules posted here (http://uefaffs.weebly.com/7/post/2012/06/the-order-of-extreme-valour.html).To recap:A “successful gamble” is defined as a single player choice that returns an unexpectedly high number of points. The awards will be given on these criteria:- Underappreciation- Overachievement- Underdog team- CaptaincyHonourable Mentions:* In Like Flynn believed Sweden could score against France, and this belief led him to Ibrahimovic (6 points) who triggered a serious upset against the fancied French.* Mark chose Greek keeper Sifakis (7 points) against the might of Russia. Sifakis won, Greece made the quarter-finals, and the rest is history. (Hopefully not, I could only live through Euro 2004 once).* Doosra and Roscola captained Rooney (C) (6 x 2 points) against Ukraine and despite every tabloid building him up, he didn’t fall, scoring a headed winner. While there was an element of expectation here, they were the only managers here to pick him (along with ENR who didn’t captain him). Giving him the last captaincy of the matchday counts for something too.* Jiracek (8 points) was chosen by that guy again, Mark. With goals from the Czechs hard to predict, this punt against a well-matched Poland paid off in style. * Ginkapo hit a bullseye against Germany with professional clean sheet destroyer Krohn-Dehli (8 points). For underdog value, overachievement and obscurity this punt takes some beating. The only box it didn’t tick was captaincy.And now for the winner:* ENR wins the award for captaining Jiracek (C) (8 x 2 points). While this was a close one, it was difficult to say no to this punt once I saw the captaincy on him. ENR’s punt yielded, after captaincy, 4 more points than the nearest differential, with a goal and clean sheet against the tournament hosts. He also resisted three chances to twist captaincy, although admittedly his points probably weren’t of concern to him.I hope you appreciate how difficult it has been to select this award and join me in congratulating all concerned.I am also pleased to announce that not only will we continue to award the Order of Extreme Valour for the knockout stages, but it will be issued to all managers whether they qualified or not. It’s the least we could do.Stay tuned for our Day 1 Report and preview of Day 2!